1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for supporting a verification of functions of hardware and software by setting an appropriate priority to a verification of each function, and a computer product.
2. Description of the Related Art
In development of hardware and software, scale of subjects of the development has been becoming large as a design technology progresses. Accordingly, verification work, which is for verifying a subject of development, forms an increasing proportion in entire work in the development. In a conventional method of creating verification items for verifying complex and diverse functions of the subject, verification items are not created from specifications of the subject, and priority is assigned to the verification items using a cause-and-effect graph (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-297412).
In the above conventional technology, such verification items are arbitrarily created by verifiers or created based on implementation of the subject of which design has been completed. Consequently, completeness of the verification items in covering the functions of the subject vary depending on experience and capability of the verifiers, and it is difficult to evaluate whether the verification items accurately cover functions described in the specifications of the subject.
In addition, in the conventional technology described above, if a problem, such as a serious bug, is detected in the subject during a verification process, especially just before finishing the verification process, work that has been achieved in the verification process until the problem is detected becomes useless. Moreover, in the conventional technology, it is impossible to determine to which of the verification items priority should be given. Therefore, when an amount of the verification item becomes so massive that verification cannot be performed on all of the verification items, verification performed on some of the verification items can be useless.